Much against her inclination, Georgiana left London just as the new parliament was getting under way. In February she accompanied the Duke to Hardwick, in the words of a friend, ‘pour faire un enfant’.2* Lady Clermont had paid the Devonshires a visit while little Charlotte was still new to the household and was pleasantly surprised. ‘I never saw anything so charming as [Georgiana] has been,’ she wrote to Lady Spencer, ‘her fondness for the Duke, and his not being ashamed of expressing his for her.’3 But relations between them had deteriorated rapidly after Harriet’s marriage to Lord Duncannon in November. To Georgiana’s embarrassment, her sister delighted the Cavendishes by becoming pregnant at once. Despite Harriet’s initial reservations her marriage appeared to be free of the tensions which plagued Georgiana’s. In February 1781 Lady Spencer wrote to inform Georgiana that Harriet’s ‘closet is becoming a vrai bijou, and she and her husband pass many comfortable hours in it. I trust indeed that all will go very well in that quarter.’4
Harriet’s good fortune contributed to Georgiana’s fear that her own failure to produce a baby was a punishment from God.5 ‘I will not hear you give way to disappointment so much,’ chided Lady Spencer. ‘If you were of my age there would be some reason why you should suppose you would never have children, but as it is there is no reason why you should give it up.’6 Sitting alone in cheerless Hardwick every day while the Duke went out hunting, Georgiana saw every reason why she should. The empty, silent afternoons were too much for her to bear and she blotted out her days with large doses of opiates. ‘I took something today,’ she wrote, ‘but I shall ride tomorrow.’7
The Duke was disgusted when Georgiana still showed no sign of pregnancy after a month at Hardwick. Deciding that their stay was a waste of time, he gave orders for Devonshire House to be prepared for their imminent arrival. After their return Georgiana rarely appeared in public. The papers remarked that she had ‘become the gravest creature in the world’ and complained about her absence from society.8 On 24 March she appeared briefly at the King’s Theatre to support the dancer Vestris, an Italian immigrant and one of the most famous dancers of the time. He was performing a new dance which he and Georgiana had invented together during a private lesson at Devonshire House. Nine hundred people filled the theatre. ‘We were in the greatest impatience for the Duchess of Devonshire’s arrival,’ reported the Morning Herald and Daily Advertiser, ‘and our eager eyes were roaming about in search of her. We spied her Grace at last sitting in her box … alas! We soon found out, that her Grace was only there to pay a kind of public visit to the Vestris, for the Devonshire minuet, which was received with very warm applause, and was no sooner over than the Duchess disappeared.’9
The reason for Georgiana’s sudden retirement was not only the disappointment of Hardwick but a crisis concerning Harriet. Less than two months after Lady Spencer had written of the Duncannons’ ‘comfortable hours’ together Lord Duncannon shocked them all by shouting at Harriet in public. Questioned afterwards, Harriet confessed that she was frightened to be alone with him, since the slightest provocation made him lose his self-control. The Cavendishes regarded Duncannon’s abusiveness towards his wife as a disgrace to the entire family. Another incident at a ball in April moved his cousin, the Duke’s sister the Duchess of Portland, to write him a warning:
You say I did you great injury by exposing you publicly to all the room – You exposed yourself, and I am concerned to say I have too often seen you do the same before … when you left the room, there was not any of the company present ( your father in particular) who did not applaud my conduct, and censure yours in the strongest terms possible … Indeed, the very first evening that you came to me after that conversation, the night of the Ridotto, I never felt more ashamed or hurt than I did for you, and I must tell you that your Behaviour did not escape the notice of the Company who heard it as well as myself with astonishment. The cards were going to your mind, nothing had happened to put you out of humour, but upon Lady Duncannon’s coming into the Room, as I thought very properly dressed, your temper was immediately ruffled because she had put on her diamonds, (a consideration I should not have thought worthy of the mind of a man). Indeed such sort of behaviour in a man is so perfectly new that I do not know how to account for it or reason upon it. You are very young and have had very little experience … The World in general was inclined to think well of you. Your friends and relations thought you were all their hearts could have wished, but do not flatter yourself that your conduct has escaped observation. It is becoming the subject of ridicule, and your best Friends begin to fear your want of understanding.10
Lord Duncannon apologized; his behaviour, he explained, was caused by worry over Harriet’s pregnancy: he feared that she would miscarry like Georgiana. The Duchess of Portland’s reply showed her contempt: ‘the frequent agitations that I have perceived your conduct to occasion her may have been the cause of this unhappy event. I trust in God she will recover [from] this, and that it will hereafter be uppermost in your mind to reward her affection for you with that confidence which she so well deserves.’11 Threats and warnings were the only weapons available to the Spencers or the Cavendishes. Eighteenth-century law granted a husband the freedom to treat his wife as he pleased, except in the case of imprisonment and physical torture. Even then, the shame of public scandal deterred upper-class women from seeking legal redress in all but the most extreme circumstances.*
Georgiana had ceased to entertain at Devonshire House immediately after the discovery and spent her time caring for Harriet. The Spencers were frightened to leave their daughter alone with Duncannon when she was so vulnerable. They kept her away from him as much as they could until she gave birth to a son, the Hon. John William Ponsonby, on 31 August 1781. Not long afterwards Lord Spencer became deaf and suffered a partial paralysis on one side of his body. The double anxiety over Harriet and Lord Spencer drove Georgiana to the gaming tables, and Lady Spencer with her. ‘I can never make myself easy about the bad example I have set you and which you have but too faithfully imitated,’ Lady Spencer had written bitterly in November 1779.12 Now she found herself writing again: she had committed ‘twenty enormities which oblige me to conclude my letter with the usual charge that you must attend more to what I say than what I do’.13 Harriet followed her mother and sister, but with less than a tenth of their income, and without the resources to pay her creditors.
George Selwyn described incredible scenes at Devonshire House to Lord Carlisle. ‘The trade or amusement which engrosses everybody who lives in what is called the pleasurable world is [faro],’ he wrote. Georgiana had arranged the drawing room to resemble a professional gaming house, complete with hired croupiers and a commercial faro bank. Lady Spencer was there most nights, throwing her rings on to the table when she had run out of money:
poor Mr Grady is worn out in being kept up at one Lady’s house or another till six in the morning. Among these, Lady Spencer and her daughter, the Duchess of D. and Lady Harcourt are the chief punters. Hare, Charles [Fox], and Richard [Fitzpatrick] held a bank the whole night and a good part of the next day … by turns, each of the triumvirate punting when he is himself a dealer. There is generally two or three thousands lying on the table in rouleaus till about noon, but who they belong to, or will belong to, the Lord knows.14
Faro was a complicated game, involving one banker and an unlimited number of players